Page 37 of Edge of Ruin (The Edge Trilogy #3)

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jack

D uncan and Vivi’s sister Nell met us at the airport. Nell was horrified when she saw the battered-looking, hollow-eyed Vivi, and insisted on sitting in the back with her little sister and holding her hand while Duncan and I debriefed.

At one point, I looked back and found Nell’s eyes sparkling at me. “What does that Latin phrase mean, anyhow?” I asked her hastily.

“Hail queen, mother of mercy, first Doric mode,” Nell told me.

“Does that mean anything to you?”

Nell shook her head regretfully. “Not in particular, no. It’s just a common phrase from the Catholic liturgy.”

We headed to Nancy and Liam’s place, and I bucked up my extremely depleted social energy to meet two new people.

Fortunately, they both seemed mellow and sensible, and disposed to be friendly and approving.

Liam struck me as intelligent and canny, the older sister Nancy likewise. I felt at ease with them immediately.

Liam had prepared a juicy and appetizing pot roast with a mountain of gleaming potatoes and vegetables. I dug into it gratefully. Afterward, we gathered in Liam’s workshop around an unfinished dining room table, upon which he had set Lucia’s unopened safe.

“So?” Nancy asked briskly. “Do we try just keying in the letters of the phrase? In Latin, or in English?”

“Try them both,” Vivi said.

“You’re sure it won’t explode in our faces if we get it wrong?” Duncan asked, his eyes wary.

“Only if we try to crack the safe,” Nancy reassured him.

Duncan looked far from reassured, but Nancy just got to it, frowning down at the keypad as she keyed in the long sequence.

The little button flashed red. The door remained locked.

“In English, then,” Nancy said, undaunted. She keyed in the new sequence. The light flashed red again. “Nope.”

We all pondered the safe, discouraged. Nancy held up the linked pendants. “Hail queen, mother of mercy,” she repeated slowly. “I’ve seen this translation. First Doric mode is a musical term. This was sung, not ... oh. Oh, my God. Yes.”

“What?” we all demanded, in a ragged chorus.

“Just a minute. Let me get something.” Nancy leaped to her feet and scurried out. She came back moments later, a CD in her hand.

“Novum Gaudium!” she announced. “They’re a Gregorian chant choir that I represent!

I took Lucia up to see their concert last Christmas, at the Cloisters Museum concert series.

She loved it! She even bought the disc.” Nancy pried out the liner notes.

“Let me see … it’s a Marian antiphon, and the phrase ‘hail queen, mother of mercy’ is the incipit.

This is in Doric mode. I wonder if she meant for us to somehow get a code out of the music. But how?”

Jack spoke up, his voice hesitant. “I don’t know anything about music,” he said. “But could the tune have some sort of numeric correspondence?”

Nancy’s eyes lit up. “Hell, yes, it could. In relation to the Doric mode, you bet it could. Liam, give me that CD player on the workbench.”

Liam unfolded his tall, rangy self, grabbed the player, and plugged it into the wall socket near the table. She selected the track. A haunting tune began. Men’s voices, deep and reverberant, singing in perfect unison. The sounds rose and fell in ancient patterns that sounded somehow familiar.

Nancy listened to a fragment of the piece, brow furrowed. She hit “stop” after a few moments, then let it play again. And again. And again, scribbling numbers after each time.

Around the eighth time, she held up a scrap of paper with a long sequence of numbers. “Twenty-five digits,” she announced.

“Try it,” Vivi urged.

Nancy keyed it in. They held their breath. The light flashed red. Nancy sagged. “Hell,” she said, dispirited. “I’m all out of ideas.”

“Try adding PMD for Primus Modus Doricus,” Duncan suggested.

Nancy shrugged, and punched in the numbers again. “Okay, guys. Here goes nothing. P... M ... D,” she said.

The light flashed green. The door of the safe popped open with a click.

None of us could quite believe it. We stared at the thing, almost afraid of the seam of darkness behind the crack of its opened door.

Liam touched the door gingerly with the tip of his forefinger and swung it open.

There was only one item inside. A piece of yellowed, ancient paper in a plastic sleeve. Thin and limp and tightly covered with cramped handwriting.

Nancy took it out. “It’s in Latin,” she said, passing it immediately to Nell.

Nell put on her glasses and peered at it.

“This must be Marco’s treasure map,” she said, in a wondering tone.

“This is a list of what look like Latin flower names, and instructions that say to move from this flower to this flower, et cetera, et cetera. At the end, it says to go down into the ground four hand spans and turn three times counterclockwise. No wonder Marco thought the treasure was in the palace gardens. The gardener at the Palazzo de Luca said that the garden had been dug up more times than he could remember.”

She laid the piece of paper down with a sigh. “Well, phooey,” she said. “We’ve exchanged one puzzle for another. And I, for one, am burnt out on puzzles.”

Liam got up. “I’ll go get dessert,” he said, sounding resigned.

Vivi got up to stretch her legs and wandered around Liam’s workshop, touching various items with her fingertip. She turned to me.

“This is all Lucia’s stuff,” she told me.

“Things that Liam and Nancy were able to salvage from when John trashed her house.” She fingered a mangled thing made of glass, pebbles, plastic, and bent wire.

“This is one of mine. The Three Sisters. I think Lucia meant for me to think of it so it would occur to me to put the pendants together.” She petted the twisted knot of materials and wire.

“I’m going to restore this. In memory of her. ”

“Excellent idea. Liam’s doing that with Lucia’s intaglio table, too,” Nell said. She laid her hand against the plane of a beautiful carved oak table that lay on the workbench. It was cloven in two splintered pieces.

“This is the famous table Duncan told me about?” I asked Vivi. “The one from the Renaissance that had the hidden drawer?”

“Yeah.” Vivi traced some brutal scratches on the surface with her fingertip. “These marks were carved on it by the SS men, during the Nazi Occupation. The men who served under Colonel Haupt, Sr.”

I leaned down to take a closer look. “Amazing detail,” I said. “I can tell in a glance what all these plants are. Common wildflowers, and whoever carved these spent hours looking at them. Look. Centaurea scabiosa. Here’s Achillea millefolium , and Linaria vulgaris , and Senecio jacobea ?—”

“What did you say?” Nell demanded.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry about that. I meant, knapweed, yarrow, toadflax, and ragwort. And this one here is?—”

“No, not that! Repeat what you said in Latin!”

“Oh.” I was taken aback by the sharp, almost frightened look on her face. “Ah, let’s see.” I glanced down at the table for reference. “I just said Centaurea scabiosa, Senecio jacobea ?—”

“They’re in it! They’re in Marco’s map!” She turned toward the door. “Duncan! Liam, Nancy! Get in here!” She collected the map in its plastic sleeve. Liam, Duncan, Nancy, and Vivi gathered around the splintered table, wide-eyed and breathlessly silent.

“The first one on the map is Senecio jacobea ,” she said. “Ragwort, did you say?”

She waited for my nod. “It says to go from there to the nearest Knautia arvensis. Do you see that?”

I studied the table for a moment, and pointed. “Right here,” I said. “That’s scabious, in English. There are others, but this is the closest one.”

“Okay. Achillea millefolium, then,” Nell said.

My finger moved down a few inches. “Yarrow.”

A breathless tension was building. I was starting to feel intimidated by it. Like a huge electrical charge was building up.

“Do you see anything named Anagallis arvensis ?” Nell asked.

“Scarlet pimpernel,” I said, scanning the table and pointing. “Right here.”

“And Trifolium repens? ”

“Clover,” I said. “Here it is. Down at the corner.”

Nell frowned. “And this is where it says to turn to the earth and go down four hand spans.”

I thought about it for a second. “Go down the table leg,” I said.

Vivi looked at me, wide-eyed, and leaned over to give me a kiss. “How’d you get to be so smart?” she asked.

“Don’t jinx us. See if I’m right, first,” I murmured. “Then reward me.”

“You can count on it,” she said.

Vivi’s sisters exchanged winks and nudges, but Liam was already examining the carved table legs that lay on another work surface.

“I labeled them when I removed them,” he said.

“Relative to the direction that the flowers are growing, this one is the front left leg. Right under that clover.” He laid it gently on the table.

Nell leaned over it. “Four hand spans,” she said. “Let’s assume they’re a man’s hands. Liam, measure four, please.”

He did so, and his hand finished up right next to a carved knob adorned with a relief of climbing vines and morning glory flowers.

Liam looked up at me. “I’ll hold it steady,” he said. “Three full turns, counterclockwise. Want to do the honors?”

I seized the smooth knob, felt the texture of the morning glory vines beneath my hand, and applied pressure. It did not budge. I tried again. Still nothing.

“I’m afraid of damaging it,” I said.

“It’s been eighty years or more,” Vivi said. “It’s bound to be stiff.”

I applied pressure once more, and this time felt a tiny crack, and then a squeak. The leg began to turn. One time, two, three. Fragments scattered, but it came free.

The bottom part in my hand was hollow. Threads had been carved into it, caked with blackened wax. I tilted it, and a cylinder of parchment dropped out of the hollow. It was ancient, yellow and brown at the corners.

I held it gingerly in my fingertips, and passed it swiftly to Vivi.

“Here,” I muttered. “I’m afraid to touch it.”

“All this time,” Nancy whispered. “And it was right here, all along. In Lucia’s table.”